Ensuring water security is a key challenge for society in the twenty-first century given the risks posed by inadequate access to safe drinking water, growing water extractions, and the impacts of climate change and weather-related shocks. The concept of water security is used by corporations, policy makers, development banks, and multilateral organizations (Sadoff et al. 2015), and it has been explicitly adopted as an objective of national water policy and investment. The World Bank has established a vision for “A Water-Secure World for All,” which guides a lending portfolio of 170 projects of approximately $30 billion (as of 2019) and has three pillars: sustaining water resources, delivering water services, and building resilience (World Bank 2019). There has also been a sharp rise in academic research on water security since 2000, including among economists.
Robert Hahn is a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and a visiting professor and former director of economics at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. He is also a senior policy scholar at the Georgetown University Center for Business and Public Policy. Bob has served on the faculties of Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, and has also held senior appointments at AEI and Brookings.
Bob is currently conducting several economics experiments aimed at improving productivity, and promoting growth and sustainability. He also continues to do research on government regulation, Internet policy, and understanding the benefits of breakthrough innovations. He served as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. Many of the findings of that Commission were recently enacted into law as The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act.
